With the introduction of the Pony 0.22.x series, we introduced two performance regressions and a tuple handling bug that could cause crashes during compilation. Pony 0.22.6 fixes the performance regressions and the compiler bug. Upgrading is recommended.

During our last release, there was a problem getting an official Docker image built. This 0.22.1 release is purely to get a 0.22.x official Docker image out. If you are on 0.22.0, you do not need to upgrade.

Pony 0.22.0 is a recommended update. It’s a large update as we ended up not releasing on our normal monthly schedule. There are some stability fixes as well as a variety of other changes. This release includes breaking changes and will probably require you to update your code.

Please note, due to some issues when releasing, we will be doing 0.22.1 release in the next day that will have no changes. It’s solely to get an official Docker image built for this release.

Pony 0.21.1 is a recommended update. It fixes a stability edge-case where memory usage could climb out of control when a large number of scheduler threads were used when there was very little work to be done.
Dynamic scheduler thread scaling based on workload Before Pony 0.21.1, the runtime would start up a specific number of scheduler threads on initialization; by default the same as the number of physical cores.

Pony 0.21.0 is a recommended update. It’s a huge release for us as it contains many stability fixes as well as a variety of other improvements. It contains a breaking change related to as and match statements. Updating existing codebases should be relatively easy.

Editor’s note:
This is the 2nd post in our “My First Pony” series. We ask new Pony user’s to share their initial impressions. The good, the bad, the ugly and sometimes, and sometimes the factually wrong. We think we can all, as an industry, learn from how we all learn. So sit back and enjoy another issue of “My First Pony”:
Background & How I discovered Pony? Me: C# developer mostly with Unity3D.

Pony-stable 0.1.1 is a recommended update for anyone who uses our prepackaged binaries. Previously, when using pony-stable 0.1.0 with a prepackaged version of ponyc, you might get a core dump for an “illegal instruction”. Pony-stable 0.1.1 resolves this issue. Upgrading pony-stable to 0.1.1 as soon as possible is recommended.

Pony 0.19.0 contains breaking changes. If you don’t use the Itertools package then upgrading should be painless. If you do use Itertools, the process should be relatively straightforward. MacOS, FreeBSD and Dragonfly BSD users are recommended to upgrade as soon as possible to fix a race condition on the kqueue event system.

Pony 0.18.0 contains a high priority compiler bug fix. We recommend updating as soon as possible. Note, however, that there is a small breaking change in this release as well. It should be a quick upgrade if you are impacted.

Pony 0.17.0 is a recommended release if you are using GCC 7 on Linux. Before this release, GCC 7 was unable to build the Pony compiler. If you aren’t using GCC 7, you can take your time upgrading. Please note, there is a breaking change in this release, but it’s quite unlikely that anyone will be impacted by it.

Pony 0.16.1 is a quick follow on release to 0.16.0. After releasing 0.16.0, we closed out a couple high priority bugs. Upgrading as soon as possible is recommended. If you haven’t upgraded to 0.16.0, check out it’s release notes before starting your upgrade.

Pony 0.16.0 is an awesome step forward but its also going to be a painful step forward. 0.16.0 features the implementation of the “Explicit partial calls” RFC. It is going to break almost every single Pony codebase out there. There are no high priority bug fixes in this release so, you can take your time upgrading.

This weekend I found myself with a couple of spare hours available to squeeze in between some yard work and making sure the baby is still alive and fed. Typically, I would use this time to play with Go or continue my love/hate learning relationship with Rust. This weekend, I decided to play with Pony.
I’m Prejudiced and I Admit it The best way to get over our prejudices is to admit them.

Sean T. Allen says I should write an early history of Pony. He says people might be interested. He’s generally right about this stuff, but I feel a bit awkward about the process. I know I will forget things, or worse, forget people. Fortunately, Sean gave me an outline on Slack based on stuff I’ve told him, so here goes.
Sean: You’ve told me this story many times. I had been telling friends for years that I would eventually write a programming language.

0.13.1 is a high priority release that everyone is encouraged to update as soon as possible. PR #1842 fixed a garbage collection bug that resulted in GC running too often and in turn could have a large impact on performance for some applications.

0.13.0 is a high priority release recommended for all Pony users. #1868 fixes a type system problem identified by Paul Liétar. Paul is currently working on verifying the Pony type system as part of his final year project at Imperial College. Expect to see more high priority releases as we fix problems that Paul identifies.

If you aren’t running Pony on Windows, you can ignore this version and stick with 0.12.2. Windows users are advised to upgrade as soon as possible if they are experiencing problems building binaries with the Pony compiler.

Thanks to Gordon Tisher for finding the cause of our extreme busy wait problem on Windows and issuing a fix for it. We consider that a high priority issue which means, release away. Since it’s only been a day since our last release, not a lot else in this one.

Hi there and welcome to the summary of the Pony 2016 “State of the Stable” community survey. It was the first of what will hopefully become an annual tradition. We’d like to thank everyone who took time to answer the survey, especially those of you who took the time to answer the free form questions. There are some very thoughtful answers sprinkled through there. Also a big thank you to everyone who let us know they appreciate the work we are doing. Open source software is often a thankless task and your words of encouragement mean a lot.